To the Limit

For

those unable to catch Cate Blanchett in the Sydney Theatre Company's new production of Hedda Gabler - and with only a handful of standing-room tickets available each night for the remainder of the season, that means most people - there is a consolation: this Hedda is horrible, and Blanchett's performance is terrible. Horrible in the sense that, 114 years after it was written, Henrik Ibsen's play, about the attempts of a general's daughter to transcend her loveless marriage to a feckless history professor, is as misanthropic as ever. And terrible, in that Blanchett's performance inspires awe from the moment she first rises from her sofa to stretch, as smooth and svelte as a leopard.

With an extended stage taking up nearly as much space as the audience, director Robyn Nevin gives the lithe film star room to prowl. A new adaptation by Blanchett's husband, Andrew Upton, which splices up Ibsen's acerbic dialogue as if in a Robert Altman movie, keeps things brisk and tense. And Blanchett plays Hedda - whose dalliance with old flame Lovborg (Aden Young) brings her under scrutiny by family friend Judge Brack (Hugo Weaving) - as neither victim nor villain, but rather as a kind of classy control freak. This most un-neurotic of actresses makes Hedda's animal instinct transparent. You can see her thinking, How far can I go?

For a 19th century housewife with delusions of grand passions, the answer is not far enough before she is forced onto her treadmill of self-destruction. This claustrophobic production can knock the air out of you. But when Hedda declares, "I can do what I want, and that is never going to change," there is a thrill in seeing an individual pitted so powerfully against the limitations of her age - and the feline grace of an actress at full stretch. That's worth standing for.